ACC Insider - ACC continues to drift away from its roots

Tuesday

Jul 2, 2013 at 8:20 PM

The ACC that helped make the conference the envy of college sports ceased to exist Monday.

By Brett FriedlanderStarNewsACC@gmail.com

The Atlantic Coast Conference came into existence on May 8, 1953, when representatives of seven schools from bordering states met at the Sedgewick Inn outside Greensboro to draw up a set of bylaws for the new league.It was a union that flourished over the next 60 years as much because of the intimacy of its rivalries as the collective excellence of its teams.Sadly, that tradition is now officially a thing of the past.The ACC of Jim Weaver, Everett Case, Eddie Cameron, Dean Smith and so many of the other legends that helped make the conference the envy of college sports ceased to exist at one tick past midnight Monday when the league formally expanded by three schools to increase its membership to 15.Commissioner John Swofford, in both an open letter to ACC fans and a news conference at New York's Nasdaq stock exchange, referred to the addition of Syracuse, Pittsburgh and Notre Dame (in all sports except football) as being "exciting and historic." And in at least one respect, it is both.Without this latest round of expansion and the grant of media rights that was adopted earlier this spring, it wouldn't just have been the ACC as we knew it that faded into memory. It would have been the ACC as a whole, leading to the very real possibility of neighboring rivals North Carolina, N.C. State and Duke being separated into three different conferences.The new lineup also positions the restructured ACC to retain its standing as one of the nation's power conferences for the foreseeable future.That stability, however, did not come without some collateral damage. It's a cost illustrated by the new "brand and style guidelines" emailed to media outlets shortly before the changes went into effect.Gone is the familiar seal that depicted the location of each member school on a map of the Eastern Seaboard. Gone are the words "Atlantic Coast Conference." The new logo is simply three large blue letters: ACC.It is no longer an acronym. It is now simply a name identifying the league, which is appropriate considering that the "Atlantic Coast" – at least in this case – now extends some 900 miles inland to South Bend, Ind.If only the cosmetic change of logos was the most significant consequence brought about by the widening of Swofford's "footprint."Of greater concern is the league's systematic drift away from its roots. It's a shift that is as tangible as a football schedule rotation that has traditional rivals UNC and Wake Forest, along with N.C. State and Duke, playing only twice every dozen years, and as subtle as Swofford's sudden obsession with all things New York. In the past week alone, the commissioner has worked out a deal with the Pinstripe Bowl, thrown out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium, climbed to the top of the Empire State Building with his league's mascots and rung the closing bell at a stock exchange. It's only a matter of time before he signs off on moving the ACC's signature event – its men's basketball tournament – from Greensboro to Madison Square Garden.Now that he's seen the big city, he has no plans to return to Mayberry. It's almost as if the Big East absorbed the ACC instead of the other way around."It's the media capital of the world," Swofford said at a news conference in Times Square on Monday. "(There's) obviously a lot of energy here."But will the momentum last?It didn't for NASCAR when it decided to shed its Southern roots and go national, and now it's paying the price in the form of empty seats and decreased television ratings.That's not to say the same thing will happen to the ACC or that the league shouldn't do everything it can to maximize the potential of its fertile new territory. But in reaching for the gold ring of increased exposure and revenue, it must be careful not to do so at the expense of the traditional base that helped make the conference great in the first place.

ACC Insider Brett Friedlander can be reached at starnewsacc@gmail.com.